Time-based Manipulation of VOB Files

Editing DVD VOB files can be a royal PITA.

I had a DVD which was a copy of a VHS tape, produced by a simple copy in an LG RC-195 DVD/VCR combo unit. The tape was of a TV show which is damn near impossible to buy now, and all the reviews of the DVD version claim it has been badly edited. Even the VHS drops the main title sequence from all but the first episode.

So - I wanted to create a backup of the tape, but also make it a bit more intelligent and be able to access the individual episodes. The primary problem was episodes were split across multiple VOB files - so I needed a tool which would treat these as a single data stream and allow time indexing into it.

Media Coder is the only tool I've found that allows setting time-based start and end points. Alas it didn't want to play nicely with joining across the multiple VOB files, particularly with the time indexing past the first file. It supposedly supports joining files, but I had no success with that.

Enter VOBmerge. This handy little tool allows multiple VOB files to be joined into one large file. It's very quick, and I also discovered that Media Coder was much quicker in transcoding from the merged VOB file than from the originals - plus it seemed to be producing smaller results at the same settings - approx 160meg XviD avis versus the approx 200meg when transcoded from the original VOBs.

[Aside: someone suggests 'copy /b A.vob + B.vob merged.vob' gives exactly the same result!]

While this is ongoing, I was happy with yesterday's progress. Next step is to join the original title sequence onto each episode, and instead of transcoding to XviD, preserve the footage in DVD format so I can create a custom menu for the DVD.